Classes

Course Description

There is, the apochryphal story goes, a sentence that is 65 pages long in Don DeLillo's novel "Underworld." Nothing but an unending series of elliptical thoughts, phrases, incomplete thoughts, fragments. Only a novel about the "shot heard around the world," we might argue, could produce such a sentence. Or, rumors of such a sentence. We will read DeLillo's novel, and not only to see if this sentence actually exists. There is nothing more ideological than sport -- there is a good reason why some critics prefer to call it "war by other means" -- in this course we will explore the connection amongst sport, ideology and literature. We will read novels, historical memoirs, short stories and, it goes without saying, works that defy categorization, in no small measure because writing on sport often defies easy generic labeling. We will wander the globe, from cricket in the Caribbean (CLR James) to football in Latin America (Eduardo Galeano, both a novelist and author of the breathtakingly beautiful, and unclassifiable work, "Soccer in Sun and Shadow").There will be books about baseball ("The Boys of Summer" will give a perspective that DeLillo does not) and a story about the peculiar genius of Roger Federer. Why, we will ask ourselves, do authors dedicate themselves so pathologically to sport? Because, as a famous football manager -- yes, we'll meet him too, his name is Bill Shankly -- once said, "its not a matter of life or death, its much more important than that."